Wednesday, 3 October 2012

Mondragón: There is an alternative

“There is no alternative.” That is the motto that seems
to currently dominate the political discourse in Europe. The other day I read a
story on the Guardian that got me thinking… Ed Miliband, head of the British
Labour Party, said that “capitalism is the least worst system we’ve got.” The
goal of his party is not the abolition of capitalism, but the taming of the
creativity towards a “decent” and “humane capitalism.” As opposed to the Cold
War era, nowadays it is rare that financial capitalism as a whole is question,
even within parties where one may expect it.

Nevertheless there are alternatives, albeit not
state-centred ones. Kim Stanley Robinson, one of my favourite science-fiction
authors, used his Mars Trilogy to portray the colonisation of Mars, and its
transformation into a more hospitable world. He describes very realistically
how a new society might develop outside the Earth’s biosphere, freed from the
archaic and deeply-rooted value-systems and dogmas. Robinson’s books may have
been written in the 1990s, but he recognised in an almost prophetic manner the
enormous potential of cooperatives. He refers particularly to the Mondragon
Corporation, the world’s largest cooperative, and one of the ten biggest Spanish
companies. This post is meant to describe this very feasible alternative to the
capitalist mode of production, which can be implemented without revolutions of
paradigm shifts, and that very successfully.

Mondragon focuses on social justice and not profit

The Mondragon Corporation was founded by the Catholic
priest José Maria Arizmendiarrieta in the 1950s, in the fact of Spanish mass
unemployment. In 2011 83,560 people worked at Mondragon. Mondragon consists of
over 100 enterprises, and produces fridges, escalators, machine parts, and
other specialised equipment. Eroski, one of the largest Spanish supermarket
chains is equally part of Mondragon. A new employee can buy herself a share of
the company after six months for €12,000. That money will be used for
investment and innovation, as well as for social purposes. In return an
employee will become an integral part of the cooperative. The managers of
Mondragon are elected once a year by a general assembly of all employees, and
the business structure of the company is completely democratic; on all levels
the employees themselves decide about the future of Mondragon. Every worker
feels personally responsible for the cooperative, and employees display the
kind of knowledge about their company that is usually only seen among managers.
But that is not the only area where Mondragon sets revolutionary standards: the
executives may only earn up to 8 times as much as the minimum salary of a
simple worker. Nearly every employee ears more though, which is why this gap is
really far smaller. One needs to take into consideration that we are talking
about a company will an annual turn-over of €15 billion. Josef Ackermann,
former CEO of Deutsche Bank, used to earn 400 times as much as the average
employee, and in many companies of a similar size those kinds of proportions
are no rarity. In the city of Mondragon, where the Mondragon Corporation was
founded, unemployment is only 8%, compared with a nation-wide unemployment of
25%. In spite of the crisis no jobs were destroyed; due to the large number of
enterprises that are part of Mondragon, workers could be allocated according to
demand. Mondragon thus provides us with a role model of a successful
cooperative. Between 1990 and 2011 the number of employees has quadrupled.

Mondragon is a role model in many ways. One the hand, it
shows the advantages of a coordinated labour market which could allow “redundancies”
to become unnecessary. As the employees themselves manage the company,
motivation is much higher. On the other hand, a democratic enterprise structure
is simply more just! Gramsci writes that a hegemonic structure can only brought
down by the establishment of a counter-hegemony. The transformation of purely
profit-oriented companies into cooperatives could form the substance of such a
counter-hegemony.

I’m going to end this post with a quote by Kim Stanley
Robinson: “The system called capitalist democracy was not really democratic at
all. […] So. We must change. If self-rule is a fundamental value, if simple
justice is a value, then they are valuable everywhere, including the workplaces
where we spend so much of our lives.” So that’s that.